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Unaffordable cities: this criminal lack of housing is a global scandal

San Francisco's Chinatown - one of the most densely populated parts of the city. Bidding wars and multiple applications are now common in the city for both buys and lets. (The Guardian; Photograph: Michael Layefsky/Flickr Vision)

To make housing affordable again, we need to catch up to decades-worth of unmet demand, over the next few years. In many cities, this means goals measured in the tens of thousands of new homes; in the fastest-growing cities, it means hundreds of thousands. Build enough housing and (economists and experience both tell us) prices should at least stabilise. Want social justice? Build a lot more housing.
— theguardian.com

7 Comments

I applied for an apt, in San SnobFrisco - it was listed for $950/month., paid my deposit and was notified that it went to someone who bid $1350/month + the landlord said the programmer who was accepted made "way more than you do" - Now I live in Oakland -

unlicensed Jr. and intermediate architects just can't pull down what a programmer at Google makes - I design condos for these guys.

"On a planet of cities, affordability is social justice... the increased risk of homelessness and the pushing out of the urban poor into suburbs where their time and money is further taxed by longer commutes and more expensive transportation – undermine hardworking people's prospects and worsen income inequality, with serious consequences for all of us."

Cities have always grown at differing rates for differing reasons. It seems like the question ought to be how our cities should grow and what constitutes a city. Cities traditionally grew by incorporating their suburbs, so I don't see why that shouldn't be the case today. Rather than building vertical ghettos like many asian cities have done, building dependable public transportation and urbanizing the suburbs would go a long way to solving this crisis. Unfortunatly so much of the current architectural debate revolves around semantics and formal extravagance while the tools to solve these pressing problems lay around unused. It's still a mystery why such an educated and progressive group such as architects can continue to ignore the growing problem of housing inequality.

The real problem is that household size has decreased dramatically over the past several decades - population growth is actually slowing, but since we have less people living in larger and larger spaces, this is a major cause of increased demand and rising prices (and even higher energy demand per individual). More people need to be willing to live with other people - this is the shift that needs to happen to help keep costs in line - not just figuring out ways to build more low-cost, low-energy housing.

we're at the cusp of a new era where we're all going to have to learn how to share in order to survive.